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Sunday, December 11, 2011

Two Plus Fours, a.k.a. Ripstitch the Tailor (Pathé, 1930)

The film was Two Plus Fours, made by the Pathé studio’s U.S. branch in 1930 as one of its last
gasps before it was absorbed by RKO in 1931 and ultimately folded into that
company after two years in which some movies came out as RKO and some as
RKO-Pathé, much the way Warner Bros. films sometimes were released in “First
National” drag. It was one of the last projects for the Rhythm Boys, the vocal
group with which Bing Crosby got his start: he had met Al Rinker, Mildred
Bailey’s brother and a singer in his own right, while both were still living in
Washington state, and the two had traveled to L.A. and been discovered by Paul
Whiteman and signed to his entourage in 1927. The duo of Crosby and Rinker did
well on tour but bombed out in New York City, and Whiteman decided that they
needed someone who would give the act more verve and showmanship. The person
Whiteman recruited to join them was Harry Barris, a live-wire pianist and comic
singer who was also a major songwriter and could supply the Rhythm Boys (as
Whiteman named them) original material. The Rhythm Boys remained part of the
Whiteman organization for three years, until Whiteman went to L.A. to make the
big-budget Universal musical revue The King of Jazz (1930) which featured Crosby soloing on the film’s
theme song, “Music Hath Charms,” and the Rhythm Boys doing a marvelous number
in two-strip Technicolor (the whole film was in color, actually) combining
their early hit “Mississippi Mud” and a new song, “So the Bluebirds and the
Blackbirds Got Together.” Then Crosby decided his future lay in Hollywood, so
he got the Rhythm Boys to quit Whiteman and join Gus Arnheim’s L.A.-based band
at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub inside the Ambassador Hotel, while the trio
also scrambled for film work.

Two Plus Fours was the trio’s last work together before breaking up
— Crosby had landed a solo film contract with Mack Sennett’s studio, where he
played in a series of romantic-comedy shorts that established his happy-go-lucky
screen character, and he’d clearly outgrown the need for the other two. Pathé
was at loose ends, too: they had never recovered from the opprobrium following
a terrible accident at their New York studio in which a soundstage burned down
while filming a 1929 musical and 11 people were killed — still the worst
accident, at least in terms of total lives lost, ever to occur during the
actual shooting of a film. They also hadn’t recovered from the loss of their
big comedy star, Harold Lloyd, who had switched distribution of his
self-produced films to Paramount, or from the loss of Hal Roach’s product,
including the Laurel and Hardy movies, when he changed distributors to MGM in 1927. So in order to
stay in the comedy market they concocted a series called “Campus Comedies,”
about the hijinks of frat boys and the scrapes they got into. Two
Plus Fours was filmed under the working
title Ripstitch the Tailor, which
would have been a better name for it — it would at least have given moviegoers
an idea of what the film was about:
Two Plus Fours vaguely hints that
it has something to do with articles of male clothing but otherwise means
nothing. (Some Crosby biographers got confused by the dual title and thought
Bing and the Rhythm Boys had made two short comedies for Pathé, not just this one.)

The 20-minute short was
actually a feature for Jewish dialect comedian Nat Carr, who plays a tailor
named Ginsberg: he’s irritated that the college boys have given him the
nickname “Ripstitch the Tailor” but he can’t do anything about it because their
suit orders represent his principal source of income. He’s being harassed by
the typical evil landlord (Edgar Dearing) but he’s hopeful because Tait
College’s new school year is about to start and he’s counting on the frat boys
to buy so many suits for the upcoming start-of-the-year rally he’ll be able to
pay off his debt. Only the frat boys got waylaid on the train coming into town:
they got into a craps game with an African-American porter (when this character
first appeared he had a disgusted look on his face while the white kids were
playing what was supposed to be a jazz number, and I joked that what he was really thinking was, “Oh, no, not more white boys who think
they can swing”) and lost not only their money but the ukuleles and other
musical instruments they’d been playing. When the train enters a tunnel (the
shots of the train moving are obviously stock footage, but director Ray McCarey
and editor John F. Link cut them in so smoothly they’re believable) the kids
jump the Black guy and get the instruments back and start their jam session
over again. The frat boys eventually arrive in town and they’re so broke they
don’t even have a car; they’re driving around in a horse-drawn cart reading
“Transfer” (1930’s-speak for a moving company) and they arrive at Ginsberg’s
just after he’s serviced another college kid in a baggy suit he insists “fits
like a glove” and caught the kid just as he was about to walk out of his store
without paying. (The kid reaches into his new suit and gets out his wallet to
give Ginsberg the money; one wonders how the wallet got there if it’s a suit he’s never worn before.)

Then
the landlord shows up and after him Ginsberg gets the college kids, who explain
that they’re broke — but he agrees to make them the suits anyway in hopes
they’ll find a way to pay him for them. The kids meet back at their frat house
and sing a song (apparently based on the University of Maine “Stein Song” that
was a hit for Rudy Vallée, America’s most popular male singer until Crosby replaced
him) hailing Ripstitch the Tailor; Crosby is featured on the song’s
middle-eight section but otherwise this is the sort of film in which a person
who later became a superstar is lost in the crowd: you hear his familiar
speaking voice, look around for him, spot him and say, “Oh, there he is.” Eventually the kids find money they held
back from the Black crapshooter on the train and pool their resources so
they’re within $100 of paying Ginsberg’s bill; they jump a heavy-set fellow
student (Tom Hanlon) who just happened to ask them to break it when they needed exactly that much money; they
pay off Ginsberg, Ginsberg pays off his landlord, and Ginsberg’s daughter Mary
(Thelma Hill) gets Spec (Spec O’Donnell), the head of the fraternity.

Two
Plus Fours isn’t all that funny — Nat Carr’s Jewish-dialect humor is very dated — and the laughs it does have are more from situations than gags, but it’s
charming and clever throughout and has at least two good gags: when one of the
students sees Ginsberg’s signs — “Don’t Use the Phone,” “Don’t Ask for Credit,”
and “Don’t Call Me ‘Ripstitch’” — and neatly slices off the word “don’t” from
each sign with his pocket knife; and at the end in which the transfer cart and the horse pulling it are decorated with frat-house
symbols the way the kids’ car would be if they could afford one. It’s a curio
for Crosby fans — no doubt if Bing hadn’t been in it, it would still be
moldering away in a vault somewhere — and one oddity is that the credits make
it seem like a Hal Roach production in exile: the director is Ray (Raymond)
McCarey, and the “supervising producer” is Fred Guiol (a protégé of George
Stevens who rose to become a director himself at Roach and RKO in the
mid-1930’s, then quit and went back to working as Stevens’ assistant and one of
his regular screenwriters). Ray McCarey was the far less famous brother of
director Leo McCarey, whom Bing Crosby would work with in the 1940’s on two of
either man’s biggest hits: Going My Way and its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s.